In the spring of 1983, a 26-year-old woman named Susan Maria Ann Cerritelli vanished from her home in Long Pond, Pennsylvania. On May 11th, her husband, Andrew Cerritelli, stated he left their home around noon to travel to Philadelphia. He claimed that when he returned at 6:00 p.m. that evening, Susan was gone. Three days later, on May 14, 1983, Andrew reported his wife missing to the Pennsylvania State Police. Susan, who was of Asian descent with black hair and brown eyes, and had a distinctive tattoo of a bird of paradise on her right shoulder, was never seen or heard from again. At the time of her disappearance, all of Susan's family lived out of state, but they found it highly uncharacteristic of her to not maintain contact with them.
The investigation into Susan's disappearance quickly focused on her husband, Andrew. He was known to be a controlling and jealous man with a significant criminal record that included violent offenses.
He was considered the primary suspect, though he was never formally charged in connection with her case. Over the years, law enforcement explored several leads, including excavating the basement of the couple's former home in Long Pond, but this search yielded no evidence. The case grew colder with time, leaving Susan's loved ones without answers. Andrew remarried and continued to have encounters with law enforcement for various offenses.
Years later, new information surfaced from two separate sources, offering conflicting and grim possibilities about Susan's fate. In 1998, a jailhouse informant told police that Andrew had confessed to strangling Susan, dismembering her body, and disposing of her remains in the ocean off the coast of Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Another account came from a former girlfriend of Andrew's, who claimed he told her he had dumped Susan's body down a hole in the abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. He allegedly threatened her with the same fate if she were ever unfaithful. The former mining town of Centralia has been the site of a persistent underground coal fire since 1962, making any search efforts there perilous due to the unstable ground and noxious gases. Andrew Cerritelli died of a drug overdose in February 2007, taking any certain knowledge of Susan's whereabouts with him. Despite the various leads and suspicions, Susan's body has never been recovered, and her case remains an unsolved presumed homicide, a painful mystery for a family that has waited decades for closure.Last Seen: May 11, 1983
